The Challenge
Dice was undergoing a major product modernization. Designers and engineers were operating in silos, re-creating patterns inconsistently and increasing design and tech debt across the platform. With no existing design system and a growing urgency to streamline cross-functional work, the company brought me on to build Dice’s first-ever design system from scratch.
The Goal
Create a scalable, accessible, and developer-aligned design system to support a unified re-platforming across Dice’s highest-traffic candidate and employer experiences.
Our approach was anchored around three core pillars:
• Design Tools: A robust Figma library including foundational and atomic components that mirrored engineering structure for seamless handoff.
• Documentation: A centralized system site design.dice.com with clear usage, content, and accessibility guidance.
• Working Code: A custom-built component library surfaced through Storybook for engineering teams.
Role
Senior UX Designer
Company
DHI Group Inc. (Dice.com)
Timeline
2023–2025
System Evolution
We've delivered two major iterations thus far, each responding to evolving company needs and structural changes.
SEDS
Our first system, Snake Eyes Design System (SEDS), was the chance to build a design system exactly as envisioned: research backed, informed by best practices, and meticulously crafted down to every detail from color tokens to motion guidelines. SEDS was our baby.
Team Formation
About 6 months into building SEDs figma library out, we recruited an incredible staff UX engineer developer to join the design systems team. Our small but mighty team of three, two senior UX designers and a developer partner, laid the foundation for the system that followed. Now we we’re cooking!
Process
• Treated the system like a product, with backlogs, roadmaps, and defined work streams.
• Created semantic JSON-ready tokens to match engineering.
• Developed a custom stencil.js code library.
Stats
6,000+
Components inserted a week
Components inserted a week
300,000+
Components inserted a year
Components inserted a year
4,000,000+
Weekly Requests handled by Snake Eyes CDN
Weekly Requests handled by Snake Eyes CDN
42
Bitbucket Repos with Snake Eyes Design System installed
Bitbucket Repos with Snake Eyes Design System installed
Empowering Innovation
One example SEDs in action was when a product designer created a blue sky design prototype for the Employer experience. The designer far exceeded expectations and timelines using Snake Eyes. The prototype mapped the future trajectory of our product and was created in mere weeks, a feat traditionally spanning months.
SEUI
Our second iteration Snake Eyes UI (SEUI) was born out of both hard lessons and organizational change.
Our initial approach with SEDs was based on promises from Architecture leadership that didn’t hold. The company restructured, creating a new Web Platform Team designed to centralize and modernize engineering practices.
Engineering leadership recognized both our successes and our failures with SEDS. They wanted to capitalize on what worked while avoiding complexity that slowed them down (custom Stencil.js implementation).
New Process
Design System designers were embedded in the new web platform team to ensure closer day-to-day alignment. We rebuilt the system using more widely adopted, maintainable foundations:
• Tailwind CSS for faster css coding.
• React Aria for accessible, production-ready UI patterns.
We refined and adapted the best of SEDS while adapting to the realities of a new tech stack and a more hands-on engineering partnership.
SEUI wasn’t just a new version of our system. It was a conscious pivot: a more pragmatic, collaborative approach that learned from our first iteration while aligning to Dice’s new engineering direction.
Overall Impact
SEUI has become a cornerstone of Dice’s product development workflow. Our documentation site, design.dice.com, now houses over 40+ fully documented, reusable components, empowering designers and developers to build faster and more consistently. As a result, time to market for new features dropped by over 40%, and customer satisfaction improved, reflected in a +5-point increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Dice’s top candidate experiences were fully re-platformed using SEUI, driving measurable business results:
45%
lift in candidate visits
37%
boost in active users
lift in candidate visits
37%
boost in active users
20%
increase in registrations
19%
increase in engagement
increase in registrations
19%
increase in engagement
What I Learned
✨ Systems evolve
A design system has to adapt to organizational realities, not just ideal best practices.
✨ Partnership is everything
Strong relationships with engineering, product, and leadership were critical to adoption.
✨ Documentation is the bridge
A well-crafted, accessible documentation site made the system self-serviceable even when dedicated support was limited.
✨ Advocacy matters
Design systems don’t sell themselves—you have to keep telling the story and showing the value.